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DOE announces NEPA exclusion for advanced reactors
The Department of Energy has announced that it is establishing a categorical exclusion for the application of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures to the authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors.
According to the DOE, this significant change, which goes into effect today, “is based on the experience of DOE and other federal agencies, current technologies, regulatory requirements, and accepted industry practice.”
K.G. Porges, M.M. Bretscher
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1903-1908
Neutronic | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurement of the local breeding rate in a large assembly of fusion blanket candidate materials, irradiated by a fusion neutron source, serves the dual purpose of blanket design support and, perhaps more importantly, of testing analytical methods and cross-section libraries. In this report, we present technical details of a tritium production rate measurement scheme based on the use of neutron irradiation of encapsulated lithium metal samples and subsequent thermal digestion of the samples in a metered carrier hydrogen stream, conversion to THO and LS-counting. A comparison of the scheme to other means of tritium production rate (TPR) measurement with respect to accuracy and other characteristics indicates that its potential accuracy exceeds that of wet-chemistry tritium extraction from lithium salt pellets or TLD deployment and is comparable to the best accuracy of lithium-glass traversing schemes. The sample fabrication and tritium extraction techniques that will be described evolved from well-tested equipment that was previously used in critical (fission) reactor work and cross section measurements, but needed some modification to increase the throughput and thus allow processing the large number of samples required in blanket assay. The applicability of this scheme to measurements at arbitrarily high neutron flux and higher temperatures will be briefly commented on.